Social finance

With an emphasis on social justice, the ILO's Social Finance Programme supports efforts to extend financial services to excluded persons by addressing two main goals:

The promotion of better employment; and

A reduction in the vulnerability of the working poor.

The pursuit of better employment means creating jobs and improving the quality of employment through innovative financial services and conducive policies. The reduction of vulnerability can be achieved by improving access to appropriate risk managing financial services, including microinsurance.

What's New

Event

Financial education: Programme design and implementation for policymakers and practitioners

This year saw the launch of a new training programme bringing together all the accumulated experience, lessons learned and best practices from a variety of actors and institutions globally. Click here to find out more about the first edition which we organized in Turin, Italy, in October 2018.

Event

10 years of Impact Insurance!

The ILO’s Impact Insurance Facility is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in 2018! We are proud of our decade-long journey to enable the insurance sector, governments and their partners to reduce households’ vulnerability, promote stronger enterprises and facilitate better public policies. Join us as we take stock of where we are, what we’ve learnt and how we plan to continue forward. Through the year, we will share lessons and experiences from the past, examine the current trends, and present ideas for the future.

Publication

Annual Report 2017

The Annual Report 2017 highlights the achievements of the Social Finance Programme over the past year. The highlights include lessons and insights on financial education, small enterprise development, impact investing and insurance innovations.

Event

Social Finance Network meeting - Mobile money and digital payments: opportunities to support the Decent Work agenda

The Social Finance Programme organized a session on mobile money and digital payments and its opportunities to support the Decent Work agenda. The knowledge sharing session took place at the ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on February 5. Click here for more information.

The training workshop was organized for the Ghana Credit Unions Association (CUA) in collaboration with the International Training Centre of the ILO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. This new training programme called MyFinCoop aims at empowering financial cooperative apex organizations and other support institutions including policy makers and regulators to advance the scale and effectiveness of financial cooperatives. The training workshop brought together 26 board members, managers, and trainers of CUA, leaders of primary credit unions and regulators. Click here for more information.

As part of PROMISE IMPACT​, a seminar was organized on 14th of December 2016 to share experiences and practices in delivering financial and non-financial services by financial institutions to achieve what is often referred as the “double bottom line”. The purpose of the seminar is to provide a platform for exchanging knowledge in inclusive finance, decent work and social performance management (SPM) as part of a strategy to achieve economic and social development.